Folder: webmail-ic-2008-11-18/Voynich
From stolfi@ic.unicamp.br  Sun Oct  2 02:43:23 2005
Date: Sun, 2 Oct 2005 02:43:26 -0300
Message-Id: <200510020543.j925hQxr014234@belem.ic.unicamp.br>
From: Jorge Stolfi <stolfi@dcc.unicamp.br>
To: "Jacques Guy" <jguy@alphalink.com.au>
Subject: [Voynich] Hello there, and VMS meeting



Hi Jacques,

I am writing to (1) tell you that I am still alive, (2) make sure
you are too, (3) make a proposal you can refuse.

As per (2), I just saw the news of the bombings in Bali, and learned
that there were Australian tourists among the casualties. I don't know
whether you would be counted as Aussie or French, so I am writing just
in case. Please reply...

As per (1), I am still too busy with admnistrative work to even read
the VMS list. My mail robot has been filing everything in a folder;
that's 98 MB since nov/2004. Gulp. I just checked the folder's last
message; it is by GC, and it implies that the VMS hasn been cracked
yet. Good to know.

Whhich brings me to (3). Last week's university council meeting lasted
10h 30m, not counting the 1h lunch served on the premises. That was
only 30m short of its own historical record. (And yet it was an `easy'
meeting , without a single item in the agenda that was really polemical.)

Anyway, while trying hard to stay awake at that meeting, it occurred
to me that a VMS workshop at Unicamp may not be such an
improbable project fter all. 

Indeed, over the past few months I have glimpsed much bigger piles of
public money being wasted on much sillier projects; but all those
incidents were quietly smothered under a few sheets of paper with
stamps and signatures. Thanks of course to rule #1 of academic ethics
--- "thou shalt not point out thy colleagues' blunders, lest they
point out thine."  

So the problem is not money, but marketing. Indeed, I think that a VMS
workshop could stand a good chance of being approved by funding
agencies, if we can dress up the proposal in a fashion that they like.
And Unicamp is always warmly disposed towards anything that would put
its name on the news.

We may have to put some extra honey on the cake, though. The best
thing would be if most of the people coming to the workshop could give
other "serious" lectures at Unicamp (and/or at other universities in
the State), before or after the workshop, as a "byproduct". Say, you
could give a lecture on rongorongo or polynesian linguistics at our
Linguistics Institute, Gabriel could speak on his medical image work,
Reeds and/or Gillogly could lecture on cryptography. (historical or
current), etc.. I think that several of the major VMS players could be
"milked" that way.

Of course, in your case we would have to finesse the Pirahã controversy
somehow, since Charlotte (who is currently the Linguistics's Institute
dean) would have to be involved. She has been still quite cordial at the
university meetings, and she probably has not been aware of the
Pirahã controversy. Perhaps she doesn't care at all for that old work,
which was quite outside of her field. So there may be no difficulty
there.

In your last message, you seemed interested in coming to Brazil. Well,
here is an half-invitation. What do you think? Should we try to make
it whole?

All the best,

--stolfi